


The World So New-and-All

by dynamicsymmetry



Series: Footage Not Found [4]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 04:03:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3367076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dynamicsymmetry/pseuds/dynamicsymmetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set between Still and Alone. Things are different. Very different. Daryl is beginning to understand why. Sort of. He's trying, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World So New-and-All

**Author's Note:**

> For [inkyfingerstoo](http://tmblr.co/mhLtBHgDaQ7KOKFvd2CEeig) from a prompt about Daryl smiling, reluctantly, for Reasons. Happy fic is happy. Because it's two hours to The Episode and I think this might be helpful. 
> 
> The story referenced is "How the Camel Got His Hump" which is by Rudyard Kipling and appears in his unbelievably charming _Just-So Stories._

There’s a lot of smiling after that.  


From her. Not from him. A switch has been flipped somewhere and everything is different, the shape of the world subtly altered. The world itself seems to be treating them differently. Food is easier to find. Water. They actually bathe - _bathe -_ and he manages to work up the courage to strip to the waist when they kneel in the creek and rinse off, and she must see the scars but she doesn’t stare and she doesn’t ask him questions. She doesn’t say anything. She’s actually stripped down to her bra and panties and they’re soaked through, and she doesn’t seem to care. Living in and out of each other’s pockets there hasn’t been much room for self-consciousness or embarrassment for a while, and while he might expect to feel some here - about her in addition to himself - he doesn’t.  


She’s here with him and she’s grinning, just clearly so happy to not be filthy anymore, splashing him, glittering drops held suspended in a beam of sun, and he shoots her a look and almost scowls except then it doesn’t happen.

Scowling is kind of hard now, actually. He has to work for it.  


So he mostly doesn’t do that either.

She grins at him, and other times she smiles when she sees something she regards as beautiful - a patch of wildflowers beaded with dew, dappled moonlight on the ground, fluttering orange of a monarch butterfly, the brilliant red of a fox’s tail. She stops him from shooting that last and he doesn’t. They’re not that much in need of the meat. She watches it disappear into the brush and she smiles, glances at him, and he doesn’t quite smile back but it’s a near thing. He can feel it tugging.

A switch has been flipped and everything is different.

He watches her braid her hair, absent motions. Early morning, cool, fire all down to coals. Sits with his legs crossed, not looking at her, except he totally is.  


He thinks she’s beautiful. It comes in slowly, over days, like spring slipping into the air. Soft and warm. She’s beautiful and he doesn’t think she has any fucking idea, and when he looks at her and she doesn’t know he is and she’s completely fluid in time, completely unaware of herself, focused on the world around her, _in_ the world and part of it and intensely, wonderfully present, that’s when he wants to smile the most.  


That’s when he does. 

Once he tells her a story. He just moves into it, without thinking; they’re sitting by the last of the fire, and they can hear something moving and hissing through the trees but it sounds like a long way off and neither of them are worried. They’re talking about nothing, sometimes not talking at all, and it’s nice, it’s easy, and he slides into a heavily paraphrased, bastardized version of a story he read in an old book once when he was a kid, a book he just picked up at random. He was little, before things got _really_ bad, before he learned that he would catch hell for things as innocuous as reading. He doesn’t remember a lot of it, but for some reason he _does_ remember this story about this fucking _camel_ of all things, and he tells it to her and she listens, her knees against her chest, and she’s smiling this enchanted little smile, and he decides then and there that making her smile might be one of his favorite things in the world.

So he keeps going, remembering more and more, and she keeps smiling, and that’s one of the first times since they started running where he thinks he’s truly happy.  


_In the beginning of years, when the world was so new and all, and the Animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a Camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work; and besides, he was a Howler himself. So he ate sticks and thorns and tamarisks and milkweed and prickles, most ‘scruciating idle; and when anybody spoke to him he said ‘Humph!’ Just ‘Humph!’ and no more._

Out of the desert. Ready to work.  


They find a beehive and manage to smoke it out enough to get some honeycomb. She smiles then, and at that point, fingers and mouth sticky in the bright sun, he can’t stop it and he smiles at her and something shivers down his spine, something pleased. They find a patch of strawberries and they’re sweet, juice running everywhere, glistening red flesh like cut gems, and it’s the same damn thing.  


Before, out here, they were surviving, hanging on by their fingernails. He never thought it would be more than that, and he frankly expected it to be a hell of a lot less. He certainly never thought smiling would come into the equation. But she does smile, and it’s wonderful. He wants to reach out, touch her, trace the curve of her mouth with a fingertip and try to understand it on a deeper level than just the pull and shift of muscles beneath her skin.  


He’s not brave enough, but he’s not sure _why_ he’s not brave. He’s not sure what would happen if he did. It’s not like he really believes she would stop him.

Maybe she would smile wider. Take hold of his wrist and thread her fingers through his. Maybe it would be good.  


Maybe someday. He actually believes there might _be_ a _someday_.

They’re alive and there’s a lot of smiling, and he’s rediscovering what it means to simply exist and be content in it. With her. Her and everything she is.  


That seems like something to smile about.  



End file.
